The Battle for Wesnoth – 1.4 Review

I wrote about gaming in Linux before and left out my favorite all-time best game: Wesnoth. I said that I would write about it so that’s what I’m going to do today.

The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based fantasy strategy that has both single player modes and a multiplayer mode. I’ve been playing Wesnoth for over a year now and have finished all the installed campaigns and tried a good number of the downloadable ones. Now, The Battle for Wesnoth -1.4 has been released (I have been excited about this) and I can say, I’ve never seen it better.

The Battle for Wesnoth is a large download. For space-hungry pc’s The Battle for Wesnoth will take a couple hundred megabytes of disk space. For my Gentoo install (on a 300Mhz computer) the process took overnight.

The Battle for Wesnoth now requires boost, which didn’t help my hard drive space either:

Install though went smooth. I didn’t realize it but my previous version was 1.2.8 (sad but true) so this was a pretty big update for me. 1.2.8, I believe was last February. Because my pc is older (I dont’ even have direct acceleration on a 4MB video card) Wesnoth 1.2.8 actually performed better than I expected. Scanning large maps was choppy and sometimes slow and computer move calculations could take awhile for large amounts on enemies. I was hoping that 1.4 wouldn’t add on additional poundage.

I’ve seen people talk about warnings with opening older saves so I took my original ~/.wesnoth folder and renamed it ~/.wesnoth-old and fired Wesnoth up.

Hmm started up quickly enough, maybe faster than before.

This is the main screen, really about the same as before. The preferences seem the same too. The screen size issues are something of a pain though. Wesnoth does support 800×600, the size I use, but the dialog to change it if off screen… yeesh. I had to change my Xserver resolution to virtual 1024 to be able to set it (see previous post). Also new was well was this, that I didn’t expect:

Crap whats that for? Not a huge issue but what the jeees? I could still play in 800×600 but it was slightly cropped as I couldn’t force the menu bar over the top of the screen.

I decided to give multiplayer a go first. I have actually never used multiplayer in all this time so I took a look:

Multiplayer seems nice and polished.

The lobby is great to be able to chat with people and see what’s going on. No one heard of a way to fix my 800×600 fullscreen resolution problem yet, but I plan to look in it more.

Since I was just looking, I decided to observe a game. Pretty cool, chat and everything. Several people were playing together at the same time. Neat. I didn’t get a chance to try multiplayer out but I’ll play it tonight.

Back in the Main Menu I decided to check on the new campaigns I heard about. Wesnoth 1.4 added seven new built-in campaigns! Yes. I have played some of them before by downloading ’em, like Scepter of Fire, but a couple I haven’t.

The campaign screen has gotten wider now – good touch, and the character models have got some touchup.

Definitely my fav:

Time to play:

I noticed it right away, over 1.2.8, Wesnoth 1.4 is alot smoother, and runs alot better!! For a 300Mhz processor I’m not stung at all. Amazing just amazing. The graphics have sweet, brand new, touches, like more subtle move directions and more obvious tile strengths. And the music, I can’t say enough of, it’s incredible! Absolutely incredible. How such high quality top notch sounds get into an open source game, I have no idea, but the music designers deserver a lot of praise. In fact the whole team deserves a lot of praise, thank you guys for all the work that you do!

Now off to play!!!

Update:I have learned that playing Wesnoth full screen on an 800x600 display is possible, Wesnoth has command line arguments that can do this:

wesnoth -f -r 800x600

To add it permanently, cp the .desktop file to the local .desktops and edit in the line above:

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